Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 24: 0.47.xx

Episode Date: February 23, 2020

This episode is the regular gang of Roland, Tony, and Jonathan discussing their experiences with the new version of Dwarf Fortress Download the new version!Dev NotesFilmMusic.ioIncompetechBay12 Games Donation Page — Please Donate To The Adams Bros! Our new Patreon Page

Welcome to Dwarf Orchish Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. So, yeah, rumor has it. I think that update that we were talking about in our last episode has dropped. I don't know. Has anyone checked to see?

Indeed. It actually happened. And I am very sorry, but it dropped on the sixth. February. Yeah, 4702. Yes, but he did make January, January 29th, 4701, the infamous Mount Bug. Yes, yes. Babies can drive their mothers. Crazy. Yeah, it was really funny, actually. I love Dorf Porteous Bucks. I mean, they truly are part of the joy of playing. And, I mean, I am very glad that it's been fixed, but at the same time, it was incredibly amusing seeing it happen and people's solutions to it so this is our first

recording after the release and because of our two-week delay between episodes recording and releasing this is one of the few episodes it's actually going to seem very dated by the time we release it but yeah you know it is what it is normally you can't tell our episodes are typically not time-based but uh but this one will so we've had the second Yeah, we've had the first The release and then the bug fix release And he is working on another one Yeah, there's still a few

Buggy bugs out there What Needs Fixin For me, one of the things that The bugs that I see The most is the friendly Necromancer bug where you get a Necro pal to come join you in your fort and they show up

And want to move in and get to work, which is so mighty friendly of them until until it's not basically it's fun until it's not have you guys had that happen not yet

but I've seen I've seen it so much on the subreddit I'm really sad that it happened so I have had a few observations one of them is the older the world the more likely

it is to become just a necromancer world that seems maybe that's always been the case I don't know not not that I've observed but um you typically have you enjoy making worlds that are really old right I mean I've done that um and then I kind of realized the only benefit really to have in the old ones at least that I can see and obviously somebody's probably going to correct me if I'm wrong but it just I think it makes adventure mode more fun

to have an older world with more creatures but I'm not sure I've noticed too much of a difference in fort mode well for example when you were talking about phone mode you can get more interesting people oh that's true that's right visitors come yeah visitors and also just migrants that come to your fortress usually have some sort of backstory before they get to your fortress really different when you start a world after five years and you will probably just get dwarves that literally just spawned right outside

of the map. I'll take it. That's pretty cool. I was just pulling up my world now to see if I have any necromancers in this latest iteration that I have running because I had a fort that I really liked and I was kind of sad I had a farmer's

guild that like my very first one in that fort and they called themselves the lavender company and I just thought that was the best procedurally generated name I've ever gotten and so I really really had high hopes for this fort and then necromancer came to town and we struggled with a forgotten beast

finally defeated it and then he the necromancer was in the military at the time whoopsie daisy and he got the killing blow and then brought the forgotten beast back to life again which added certainly added an interesting complication which was it came back

and it was even more fear and then proceeded to wipe out the entire rest of the fort until I was able to lock it in the kitchen. So that was probably not the way that it was intended to be, but it certainly did make for an interesting story. When the forgotten beast was resurrected, though, I wonder if it would have obeyed the necromancers. No.

No, it was hostile. And I think it might have killed him. One other thing that I've run into, and it's not directly related to the reliance. lease, I don't think, but the liaison from the mountain homes was a goblin. And whenever the caravan came from the first, from the first time, this is a 250 year of the world. That's amazing. So when the caravan shows up, the goblin meets with my manager, and they make their trade agreements and all that. But the goblin doesn't leave with the caravan. The goblin has just

been hanging around in the meeting area at the tables. And as far as I can tell, she doesn't have any she's not really doing anything i can't tell that she's inside anything but she's been there for about two years now and just hanging out so i'm wondering if this is actually a villain who's trying to turn my people and i don't realize it i haven't got i haven't got any real evidence of that but since that is now a possibility in the game of course it makes me wonder about it and it's added a another dimension to the game if you will i i like her to description. It's basically said that it's a long-haired green skin goblin who's propensity to evil makes her just a really bad person. But they seem to like her in the

meeting hall. Well, maybe she's got a good social awareness, whatever that scale is. It was interesting. I thought that that is not a thought that I would have had had I not known that villains were a possibility in the game now. Yeah. I haven't had it happen yet. I was playing a lot of adventure mode and I came across the pet stuff and I was really getting into all this animal adventure beast master thing and the first thing I've got myself was a war grizzly and a war elephant because I thought well that is really good which it was I could even ride my elephant or my beer so it was

a drink more true but the bear was so terrifying that he would kill everything on sight and when I say everything I actually mean everything for some reason my stupid bear kept killing people

bad luck yeah I was just in the woods and every time I was trying to get into a town like two times maybe three times and my bear would always run off and kill people and I don't know why my elephant didn't do anything

he was really friendly really nice except for the one time he stomped the crow but later on I made myself a real beast master and got myself maybe eight war dogs and I have to say that war dogs are really terrifying like I got eight of them

and I didn't even get to fight Like, I fought zombies, I fought lions, I fought a few goblins, and I only got one hit on the goblin, one hit on one frail lion, and maybe two hits on a zombie before they all died. Because my dogs kept piding up and biting and scratching and... It was insane. They had no chance against me, and my dogs. Is it that you have to build your own gear as an adventure now, or your job? just able to. Yeah, you can now really say what you want, what to start with. Before you had to invest in a weapon skill to make sure that you start with a fairly specific weapon. So, for

example, if you wanted to start with a weapon, you had to have at least in the V's weapon skill in some something. For example, if you wanted to start with a sword, you had to be at least in of these swordsmen and now you can actually ignore all of that and just have no weapons good at all and you can decide what

kind of weapon you want and it's so specific that you can even say what weapon, what it's made of and what quality it has. It's really insane. You can now basically start with a

steel battle axe that is an artifact. It's so good. It's so good. Of course, you only have a limited amount of points you can spend on it

and the same points go into the whole pets stuff. But hey, on the other hand, you can actually get full plate armor and a shield and a crown at the very beginning of your

adventure. That is a whole world that I've really not gotten very good at. Tours in adventure mode have been short or short and sad. It's just sometimes I end up doing more harm than good. Like I tried one time to start up in adventure mode to rescue some dwarves that kept getting kidnapped. So I found where they were kidnapped and I got them. And then I didn't realize that they couldn't swim and so I led them all to the river and they all drown. Oh, dear. So that was a little bit sad. But usually I just sort of wander around.

I can never seem to get people to join me. That tends to be a problem because then when I leave, I just get killed. Or I'll spawn in the middle of a goblin pit or a dwarf fortress and just be stuck forever. Never be able to find my way out, which is... Yeah, I feel about pain. Not uncommon. I'm just like, oh, well, this is... I'm going to die in the fort.

Okay, well, here we go. Oh, well. I do know how to get out of trees now. That's pretty exciting. That was my big accomplishment. Just with jumping down? No, I figured out how to climb, so I'm pretty excited about that. You know, I can actually climb trees.

Yeah, it's super, super exciting thing to have learned. We need to have a tutorial now to show me how to climb out of a tree if it gets stuck in one. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't describe it as straightforward, but what is? But yeah, it's cool. So, Roland, you were off on holiday to the land of Australia, right? I wasn't in Australia, but okay. Oh, you weren't? No.

Austria? Oh. What? Same thing where they speak German with the koalas. uh why do you think i was somewhere with i i don't know i thought why did i don't know i thought that you're on a holiday in australia thank god we're not doing this live that's all i've got to say um no i mean you're correct i had holidays and i was not at home but i was in fact not in in Australia.

I think you're like mixing we up with someone else, but I was still in Germany just at the North Sea and eating fish and stuff. I was hoping it was at least the southern part of

Germany to kind of kind of can lend some sort of credence to the story. Is this just my own pure, is this my own pure fantasy? Did you think that he was in Australia, Tony? I didn't think that.

Wow. I have no idea where this came from. Well, never mind. I was going to ask you how the Fortress release was playing down under, but never mind. I guess maybe we'll have to get a guest from Australia. I think we can arrange. They seem to be a few interesting folks.

So that's exciting. Well, to see if I can recover from that. So, Roland, when you were on holiday, was the new Dwarf fortress release all the buzz there? Actually, you see, the day it happened, I was out with my family wandering around. I had no internet, and I didn't know, and I came back to our house very late, and I was logging onto, like, the subreddit, and suddenly everyone, it's wild, you know? I'm talking about the meme where the guy comes in with a pizza and everything is on fire. That's what happened. I came in.

Everything was wild and everyone was going insane. And I'm like, what? And I was so confused. And then I heard the update was out. And I wouldn't say I was screaming about it, but I was. in fact running around and telling my mom about it and she was like oh that's so cool

she's going to download it right now yeah but I still had to wait until Monday to play it the first time I only played adventure mode for the first few days maybe three days ago I started to really

play a fort mode like seriously now and it's so good it's so good I have a dungeon keeper and it's amazing I wanted to have like a sheriff but for some reason the position changed its name now he's like a dungeon master or something or mass of dungeons or something and I can basically imprison people that may or may not be troublemakers it's who this is so amazing I'm sure that he won't torch anybody but I mean

I'd love it. I think that until you have 20 dwarves, that the name of the noble is still sheriff. Hmm. Cool. So how has interrogations been? Have you guys had any interesting interrogations or anything? I tried it both in adventure mode and in Fortnite. In adventure mode, I found out that some bandit guy,

this guy was just camping outside a small town and he had like two buddies and I don't know some some small animal and I was just stealing stuff from them while they slept and suddenly he woke up and was like what the heck you're doing here and I was like oh tell me about your boss and for some reason he actually did

that's right the best the best offense is a good best defense is a good offense yeah he just sat down with me and told me about his life and his feelings and his boss and i kept saying that his cloak and his like hood was looking really nice on him it was like oh stop it here and later on i got into the legends mode and i totally forgot about this but then i found out who he worked for in fact he worked for a necromancer I didn't get that when I was playing, but he was, in fact, working for a necromancer. And a few days later, after I left the adventure mode and went on, he went into the very town he was camping before and a specific artifact book or something and brought it back to the necromancer, his boss.

The Macromancer then wrote a book about the whole ordeal. So the Macromancer boss wrote a book about his bandit guy going into a town and stealing a book, which is hilarious. And I made an adventure later on and went into the exact tower of that guy and stole both books and brought it back to the town where They originally were made hilarious. But in thought mode, I tried to investigate something, but my master of dungeons or dungeon master, whatever, he's called now, was way too incompetent for that and kept failing all his skill checks. So after a while, just stopped doing it because it had no sense to continue, sadly.

I think he really needs some buff there or help or something, but he's bad, man. He's really bad at it. When you were playing adventure mode, Roland, did you run into any of the shrines with the divination dice? It's so funny, you ask. I actually did run into that, but I was incredibly stupid. I had no idea what happened or what the shrine does, as well as the dice. I just took the dice and used it to beat a goblin to death without ever rolling it. You used the shrine or the dice to beat the goblin to death?

No, no, I took the dice. I took the dice and beat a goblin with it without actually rolling it. Maybe I've rolled and I didn't read anything. But I'm fairly sure I didn't roll the dice. I just used it to slam somebody to death. Yeah. And later on, I found out when, oh, no, oh no, I wanted to say the forbidden guy's name. But, no, that's fine.

He's not forbidden anymore. He's not forbidden. Okay, okay. Then I can say it was Crookesmash's video, and he was talking about the dice. And I was like, wait, you can actually use the dice? Oh, okay. Yeah, well, hmm. Yeah, I was going to talk about it here in a few minutes anyway,

because it looks like that he uncovered that you can roll dice that aren't the divination dice at the shrine, but it won't do any good. And I'm wondering if your adventurers still had those dice away from the shrine and they rolled them if they would have any magical properties away from the shrine. so it'll be interesting to find out um i thought the shrine itself enables the fact that rolling is magical but not so the dice itself is not magical but the shrine is red based on his uh his experiences it may be a combination of both but he had one of his uh one of his characters actually roll dice on the shrine and it didn't do anything that would for

with dice that were brought from outside. And, you know, it could be also some other set of circumstances that weren't just right. But I don't think that everything's been uncovered yet for the dice rolling in the shrine. No, I thought that was interesting first foray into it, though. Yeah, yeah. The whole video pretty much was them on a quest to find dice to roll. Yeah, exactly. It could see how he's crap addicts.

Yeah, I think for me, the adventure mode stuff, I mean, I don't really know what I'm doing. So for me, it's just like, and I'm going to go and see how long I cannot die. And that's usually till nightfall, generally. But it is, but it is pretty cool. I've just not really even scratched the surface as far as how to pick up quests or track people or get companions when I start out. I still can't figure out how to do that. I've got pets. But I feel like I might, maybe for an upcoming episode, we should dedicate that to adventure mode.

Wouldn't be a bad idea. Not a bad idea And what fun we'll have I mean for adventure mode Has never tripped my trigger Quite as much as Fortress mode Well I discovered Dwar fortress Through

Through the roguelike genre And I do enjoy Nethack But it turns out that the simulation As part of the Fortress mode Is what really really drives me To play Dwar fortress And that's the part that I just really love So if I have an hour or two to spend

I am going to sit down and if I have a choice between, you know, rolling up an adventure or spinning up a fortress, I'm probably going to sit down and do the fortress because I know that that's really what I'm addicted to. And I've always liked those kind of games anyway. I've loved SimCity through most of its iterations and the Sid Meier civilization stuff. I've always loved Sim Ant back in the day was, I just loved that game. So I don't know that I'll spend a whole lot of time in adventure mode. But if we do on purpose, if we plan on it and have an episode dedicated to adventure mode, then I certainly will do. You know, I'll tell you what I think is really cool about it, or the compelling part to me is having a world where I've built

several forts, and I know the dwarf civilization fairly well, and I know the goblins that I've been fighting against, and being able to generate an adventurer and drop in and kind of check on all the stuff from a different perspective I think is really cool sort of like in SimCity 4 where you could spawn as a car or a helicopter in your town and drive around the roads it's sort of like that almost

or where you can go into your own fort and see people like I had one where I joined and dropped in and went to my fort and then went in and then ended up getting into a fight with the mayor of my fort who was just kind of a jerk and I just got a little out of control and I ended up

mortally wounding him and then when I went back in he was in the hospital bed and couldn't move whoopsie daisy but my grizzly bear was still in the fort quite happily chilling nobody seemed to see what happened to the poor mayor um that side of it's kind of fun yeah definitely at some point i started playing it uh so adventure mode i mean and at first i was like what is happening but I tried it I tried it again and again and again and of course I kept dying and most of the time I didn't even make the night

but it didn't matter I tried and tried it again and now I can definitely say that usually I don't die during the first week so I can make actually a full week only if I steal some food of course because you have so little food and one time I made oh god what was it some

animal man and that guy could only eat plants so I starved because I couldn't find any plants he wanted to eat I had strawberries or something and he didn't want it so I was desperate in finding something else but usually I can manage but I die in combat and I have no idea how to heal myself. One time I had a tiny, tiny wound that kept bleeding and I had no idea how to fix it

and I just died because of some stretch and that was quite annoying. One more thing, I'd like to mention about the new release is this is the first release that I've actually been playing Dwar Fortress and keeping up with things and this whole experience has been absolutely unique

as far as I know that the release has really shown that this isn't this is more of a hobby than a game there is a definite community around it and it is totally interacting with the community through the Bay 12 game site and the subreddit and the YouTube videos maybe they're a bit on the periphery but but this has more of a community feel to it

than any other game that I've ever seen as far as video games goes it doesn't remind me more maybe of Dungeons and Dragons except even then the the community didn't have the direct access to actually kind of talk to TSR games or Wizards of the Coast or whoever where here the people are playing it toady's seeing what's going on with it and the back and forth is just amazing it it's a unique game and and i love that you know what's been interesting to me is seeing um is seeing how people kind of are banding together and kind of cooperating on getting things like df hack patched and ready and you've got you know some of

the the folks that do the launchers and stuff um you know it's cool just seeing it and somebody was you know There was something on one of the forums and somebody's like, hey, I just compile DF hack for Linux. If anybody wants it, here's a path to the compiled binaries. And it's just kind of cool watching everybody sort of piece together these bits of, I don't know, important kit for the game. And, you know, it's all unofficial and unsupported. And I don't know, that's kind of half the fun trying to, you know, even get DF hack to compile on a Mac or whatever. It's pretty cool. That is unlike any other video game I've experienced.

We don't do that in just cause or whatever, for example. Are you a, do you consider yourself a gamer outside of Door Fortress, Tony? No, I don't. I don't really play any games. Maybe just the city builders and stuff. That's about it, really. Roland, do you have a large gaming life outside of Door Fortress? I would say yes, because I have nothing else in my life.

Yeah, I game a lot. Well, that got dark real quick. It wasn't meant that way, but, you know, you know. Yeah. So is there other game communities that surround any of the other games that you play that has a tight community like Dwar Fortress does? Well. And if there are, that's fine. I'm not saying that Dwar Fortress is like, you know, the super greatest game on on the earth because of this community. But curiosity makes me ask if this is perhaps not unique. I think some of those MMOs do. Like I think some of those, like if you look at if you drop into the world, of Warcraft thing.

I mean, they're all bigger so it's a little hard to tell, but that's so huge. I love World of Warcraft too, and I can definitely say that the World of Warcraft community is a fire and salt and you should stay

away from it. No, no really. It's not cool. Most competitive games are extremely bad when it comes to community. So I'm talking maybe I shouldn't say names

you know but competitive games are usually the worst when it comes to community because now you can also bash people outside of the game other than that okay you know what I'm naming it Overwatch

Overwatch community is so bad ooh it's almost unplayable other games that actually have a good community I tried to get into StarCraft once and people are really helpful so they will you know you ask a question

and they pile up and tell you how to do it while it is still a competitive game you know but also factorial oh yeah factorial it's really interesting because there is so much math and

you ask something and after like five minutes people are doing math in the comments and you're like, oh, stop, stop, please, no numbers. Can I digress? I just realized there was one thing I was going to talk about with the update that I think is super cool. Sure.

Go ahead. So have you guys, I don't know what your relationship with was to aquifers in the previous versions of this game, but I, for one, avoided them. Yeah, if I could, you know, I would use D.F. Hack or whatever the, not D.F. Hacks. the, if I accidentally did get an aquifer, I would just drain it with DF hack because I'm too fragile to deal with it, or I would just try to generate a world that didn't have aquifers in it and pretend it didn't exist. But now with the light aquifer thing, I almost don't want to embark unless there is a light aquifer because it's like instant and easy water source. It's great. I think it's really cool and it feels a bit more realistic. Maybe if, you know, if we're talking realism in a world where we're digging down in the earth with doors. it feels like it's kind of a cool thing because it doesn't instantly just flood you to death. You can, you know, if you're canny, you can get your log set aside and put up barriers and, you know, protect your stairwell. And then you can do cool things like, you know, dig another shaft and have it drain in there and you get an instant well. That's pretty cool.

And then there's the the Krug Smash thing where he ended up using the light aquifer to make a misgenerator or whatever. or at least talked about that. That works. That's pretty cool. I mean, there's just all these cool benefits from it. I'm digging it. I like that aspect. Mm-hmm.

The light aqua first, yeah. I tried to make a misgenerator just like Kruggy. It didn't work that well because it was just way too little water. Other than that, I tried to dig into one of the light ones, but it kept going down and it had like 10 Z levels of the light aquifer

and after maybe six of them I stopped I had to cheat and then I saw I still had four levels to go down before the aquifer stopped and I was like no no no and then I made a world without them

that's really weird I hadn't had that one thing that I did find is sometimes as I was digging down, and this is the part where the stopping for damp stone is so annoying, I noticed that it would basically drip down into the next layer, because what I've done is I'll use the down staircase, and then I'll have them just keep digging up-down staircases. Oh, I found out how staircases work this update, too, finally. Whoops, after I punched a hole into something, and I was like, oh, no, that's it.

It actually punches a hole into the layer below at me like that. And I caused a bit of a fortress flood because I hadn't quite taken on board that up, downstairs are like a punch through the ground. So that's something to think about if you're playing that game. There's a great graphic that I saw once that explains the stairways, the stairs really well. And that's how I learned up with that. That's an aside. Go ahead. Yeah, no.

I mean, in this one, I had dug out this big pan. And then I was going to build a tower in the middle and bridges on the sides to try to have. you know, to try to make this little bastion in the lake or whatever. And to construct it, I had used, I had the dwarves build up downstairs instead of just upstairs and then an up down stair on top of the upstairs. And I hadn't realized that the up-down stair, when you construct it, it punches a hole down. And so the minute that I flooded, of course, all the water flooded into the farm below,

and that was the end of port. Whoops, see, Daisy. But I digress. No, what I was saying with the stairs and the light aquifers is I think the water will drain down and it'll make it look like the aquifer's there, but it's not really there. It's just made the steps or the hole below wet. I don't know if that could have been what was causing the problems.

But if you go fast enough, if you dig fast enough, you can kind of get past it and see where the real aquifer action is. But the damp stone, pausing for damp stone, would be awesome if you could toggle that off, so you could dig through the aquifer quickly without having to hit space to unpause every single time they're digging through a damp time. It's just not cool. Come on, guys.

So that is an option in D.F. Hack, right? I think it is. Yeah. Well, I know it's in the launchers. Lazy Noob Pack. Yeah, in the launcher. I think in Lazy Noob Pack, you can check, you can uncheck pause for Dampstone. I want to say that's in one of those Init files, which I started playing around with a little bit more once in the Xenella.

It's also in the Inid files. But if you're a lazy crappo like me, you will just wait for. for the lazy new pack and yeah it's out now the pre-alpha of it is out now it's playable by the way check it out guys it is it is

hashtag making ads for people unfortunately it's not the Linux one isn't updated yet no and I know that somebody has also managed to build a hack of text

will be text so if you are eager to play with some of the tile packs that need TWBT, then you can... Talk about Clenodevs? Yeah, I think is that the patch? I know there's a couple of them floating around out there. Clenodev on the subreddit, I believe, released a... It's not exactly the lazy nude pack, but he released a pack of, I think it was the first release that had a Phoebus, yeah, had the Phoebus tile set, and I believe it had text

will be text in it as well that he had as kind of a basically I think he just set it all up and zipped up his door fortress folder and posted that for people to use if they wanted he did yeah that was a solid solid move that was really cool frame rate was way too high for my taste though I I like to have it be at a more leisurely pace even whenever they're doing something as mundane as mining out a cavern that's in the init. text file you can change that and set your frame rates. I don't know what his was set out. I always set mine to uncapped, and then I set graphic to like 400 or something ridiculous. I'm going to let it move fast until I have too many doors, and then it naturally slows. And I'm also enjoying just the fact that

I'm playing with a vanilla. It's a lot of fun. I'm more and more warming up to it. I do like the neatness of the graphic sets, as opposed to the kind of messy-looking floor. even if you put flooring or uh or smooth stone i'm not a big fan of the floors and vanilla but nor am i yeah i'm i'm i'm with you i can i can enjoy the game in vanilla but there are things that i mean honestly things that i miss in in the tile packs i just i just like the way that the smooth stone looks and the walls look and i like you know not i don't know it's just sometimes i get a little muddled sometimes what's the at sign what's the You know, I don't know, it's just, I like my little pictures.

And there's some really neat, there's some really neat art out there. Like, even just the simple stuff like Phoebus and Mayday, those are cool, those are cool tilesets. They're not super whiz-bang, amazing graphics, but they totally give it a feel and a, I don't know, I dig it. I mean, I like to, I had fun with vanilla, but I'm thankful that there are tile sets. So far, Phoebus and Meph are my favorites for the tile sets. and maths is just so freaking intricate it really is

that that guy spent so much time building and compiling and making it look awesome it's it's kind of hard to beat that one I liked vet the vet lunger

I don't I can't say you like that one yeah I love it I just wanted to say that I'm basically just waiting for him to like I don't know

he dropped it but it didn't work really well for me so I hope that he will make a new update and I'm fairly sure that one needs text will be text. So I'm just waiting for text will be text to be updated so I can play with

Bettlinger because I love his monster sprites. They're so grunchy and evil and have you seen the floating eyeball and the meat blob stuff? It's so gruesome. I love

Yeah, I really like his stuff as well I think that's a great tile set And I definitely am missing playing with it It looks so good in 4K I mean if you play on a high DPI screen or whatever It's really cool The detail is great And the stone work is really cool

I love the way he's made the minerals look And it's neat You're battling your If you listen Just update your stuff and bring it out Okay Well, no, I think he needs... I'm a fan.

We need TWV2. We need text. We need text. That's what... I think that's the missing piece, right? Yeah, I guess. I guess. Because in the new lazy noob, you can select that Linger's tile set, but you'll get it without...

Text will be text, so you'll be missing pieces or whatever. You know, it'll look a little funny. But it's there. I do have an announcement to make. I'm going to be presenting a Let's Play Dwarf Fortress at OzCon 2020. As I'm sponsored by Missouri State University of West Plains. If anyone is in West Plains, Missouri on April 24th through the 26th, stopped by the Civic Center in West Plains.

I will be there. I'm not exactly sure where yet of exchanged emails with one of the organizers, and he was quite enthusiastic about having me there. I basically just requested to, to not put me in with the competitive gaming tournaments and I would be happy with it. That would be fantastic to get it and have it be with the Overwatch community

who Roland just described as being super welcoming and friendly. Yeah, I told him that when I thought that it probably would go best in the RPG rooms. The problem with that is, is they probably get the laced traffic at the convention. Those are in conference rooms and, you know, people go in and sit down and play a game of Pathfinder or D&D or whatever. But that's probably the group of people who would be the most interested in it. I'm kind of hoping that they end up putting me, like, in a corner of the main arena so that people can just walk by and see.

And for listeners, this Ozcon is not to be confused with the Pomona Ozcon, which takes place in July, and it's a celebration of the world of Oz, as in, or as in the Wizard of Oz. Or the Australian convention, which a person that I was chatting about this online

thought that I was coming to Australia. So maybe that's where I thought that you were in Australia there. So it's delightful. The Pomona Wizard of OzCon. So, I mean, I guess now I never knew about that until today. So I'll plug that.

I guess it calls itself OzCon, all one word, as we're yours, is Oz-Dash-Con. Oz-Cone.com. There's not a whole lot on the website as of yet. But April 24 through 26, West Plains, Missouri, if you're in the area, stop by, say hi. I'm planning on having a 42-inch TV for a monitor, and I'm going to play on my laptop, and I'm going to, me and my dad are going to make a sign that says, let's play Dwar Fortress with the stylizing from the Bay 12 game site. Hopefully you'll be able to see what it is from a ways away.

You're going to do us proud. That's fantastic. Looks really cool. And have you thought about how you're going to show it, like what it's going to look like? Are you going to go ASCII? Are you going to go tile sets? I had thought about that, and I still haven't completely decided,

but I suspect that I'm going to go with a tile set, probably with a lazy noob pack and so that I can have the least amount of cruft that I have to go through while I'm sitting there playing, trying to show people things. I'm with you. I'm with you. I think if you're introducing this to people that have never

seen it before, I think the ASCII definitely appeals to a certain kind of person. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I just mean like people who are like really curious about something. I think that the ASCII and the kind of the obfuscation of the ASCII, is compelling and interesting

and I think it could draw in a certain type of person I know I find that stuff really interesting but I think if you're going wide appeal I'm going to say I think you'll probably have more wide appeal with a tile set just because the ASCII itself

I think is quite a lot to ask of some people and you know I don't know I'm not knocking it because I think it definitely has a place and I think it's cool but but I think if you're going mass market you're going to get probably more interested if you're playing something that looks like something that you know normal people could see as opposed to something

you've got to teach yourself to see what do you think roland that is true yeah yeah i agree uh while aski is you know it's the real flavor it's the original it's standard but on the other hand um the four first timers or people that have never played it askie is super super confusing and they don't know what's going on which is absolutely fair I've been there, so I think a tire said it's a better option. Well, I'm going to be there for a large number of hours because it starts on Friday evening and runs through Sunday evening. So I plan on being there at my booth aside from going to grab something to eat and

taking short breaks. I plan on being at the booth at the whole time. So, you know, whenever 5 o'clock in the afternoon and the evening rolls around, I might switch to Aski just to change things up, or if there's some hardcore people who, you know, say, you know, gee, I've played NetHack for years and I've heard about Door Fortress, then I might go, oh, here's what it looks like if you really want it to be hardcore

and spin up a fortress in Askema. I've played it. I'll be honest. When I first started playing this game, I was at a work conference and there was this really boring talk that I didn't want to hear

but I couldn't really excuse myself. So of course, I pull up Door Fortress on my laptop and I can play it. Nobody really knows what it is. It's sort of, you know, I pop up a terminal window. People think you're programming. It's kind of cool. You know, like, I'm doing work.

So, yeah, so there's that aspect of it. I guess if you're trying to sky up during some. Yeah, yeah. Those little smiley faces, those are representations of network packets. That's right. You never know what those things are. That, I suppose, is one pro maybe to

the Asky tile set is, you know, people aren't going to ask you about it. Or they might. when I was playing it at the conference, somebody did come up to me afterwards and he was like, oh, that's the game where the elephants like stomp on you and destroy you, isn't it?

I was like, yeah, you know what's up. So here's another question for you guys. This is more of a door fortress question. Fortress mode. So posing this is a question, I have very rarely been able to do much in caves and caverns. Like I, you know, I think that it's really cool, the caverns, but I really never try to build and use the caverns to my advantage. When I'm, let's say that I were to like start building on a cavern floor, I found this nice thing.

How much do you guys like secure the fortress up the Z levels? I mean, do you build walls up to try to totally seal it in? Or do you just put in like walls around your one Z level that you're working on? Or what's what strategy, if any, do you guys have for that? You go ahead, Roland. Okay. If any. Yeah.

It really depends on what kind of biome you're in. If you have a fairly secure, nice place, you know, like what's it called? serene and stuff then you don't actually need waltz. You might get some waltz or spiders don't come in or troglodytes or whatever

but you really don't need walls. All you need is maybe a door or two and keep it like not locked but closed so pets don't can open it maybe throw some cats into your caverns but

that's it. That's all the security you need. What are the cats in the caverns do? They eat just a bit of flavor, you know. You have like cats and caverns and eating stupid vermin stuff. Oh. It really doesn't matter.

They are useful? Yeah, fairly. And they also reap, like you can basically make a native cat population in the caverns and hunt them food. This is going to piss people off, but I always have a lot of cats around because they make good soap and leather. Yeah, yeah, obviously. Yeah, real

sorry for folks that have heard that on the podcast and probably will unsubscribe. That's really not going to upset the people who listen to our podcast. Okay, right. Oh, no. I think it's safe to say that we're not a general audience podcast. Hey, if you can't appreciate a good pair of cat leather

shoes, you know, then maybe it's not time to listen to their show anymore. Oh, gosh. Back to the caverns bit, the reason that I didn't, that I just punted over to Roland is that while I might go in there and get some fungi wood and mine some goods there, I try to avoid actually putting any kind of fortress parts in it because the floors are so annoying. I want to have an area that I can do that's flat that I don't like seeing my dwarves go ungulating up and down in Z levels that tends to happen a lot in the... Oh, yeah, it gets really complicated there with. whole of Z levels who will just disappear

and they come and go and yeah it gets a little wild in there it's a treasure store for me and not a place to build what really

works well and it's a lot of fun is using the caverns not really as main building place but everything

where the caverns aren't so the black places the massive stove you go into them and build your fortress in them.

So you go around the cavern itself and just stay in the stone and make your fortress there. And that sometimes is actually a challenge because you have very limited space and stuff. On the other hand, it looks really cool and is really worthy. Thing is, you should not do it if you have an evil biome or a resurrection biome because then you will have at that time both from all the zombies everywhere and the massive leg spikes

so the best thing is actually if you embark on a evil biome you should not even try to find the caverns because as soon as you find them your FPS will drop down to almost zero that's oh we lost somebody

Blinky, get back here. Who represents Blinky. Oh, hello. There you are. I kind of lost my train of phone. You were saying that if you're in an evil biome, don't even bother trying to open up the caverns, because as soon as you do, your FPS drops to zero. Yeah, exactly.

And it's just, it's not worth it in the evil biome, because all you get there is trouble and a lot of that. and usually you have enough to do with all the above ground dangers. So really, you don't need that. Well, when our recording bots start timing out, then that's a good alarm to say that it's time to start happening the episode. I think it might be. Well, awesome. I think by the time we record again,

I bet we'll see another bug fix, which is just so darned exciting. we're in that season yeah so good good stuff it's all it's all go well guys it is awesome it has been fun playing the new release

and and uh we will talk to everybody next time yeah have a great have a great cavern dwelling adventure mode pet riding pet pet pet petting goblin spitting adventure and Roland I'm glad you made it

back from your arduous a mini-hour plane flight from another part of your country. Where he was down south in Germany. Sorry for everyone that had to experience that. Oh, God. Oh, you know, I'm going to leave that. Oh, gosh. I never have Australians on the show.

They're just going to be like, God, that guy looks. Melbourne. Melbourne. I'm from Melbourne. Down south. All right, guys. We'll catch y'all next time. Bye.

Bye-bye. See you. This has been Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundable.com. Please stop by and leave a comment or suggestion in the comments section for this episode. While you're there, you can subscribe to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable or find us in the podcast service of your choice. Music for this episode is from filmmusic.io. Skykew Ellen and Folk Round are both by Kevin McLeod.

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